Capgemini & MIT latest research report introduces a new approach for companies to drive engagement by giving their customers greater control, and leveraging information on their behavior without seeming exploitative. Find out more about the collaborative customer exchange by downloading the report.

Adblock Plus and Flattr today announced Flattr Plus, a way for users to automatically contribute real money in exchange for what they read, listen to, and watch on the Web. You can sign up for the latest attempt to monetize online content now, but the beta will only start rolling out “early this summer,” with a first stable release slated for the end of this year.

Jean-Marie Grange's insight:

"People’s growing willingness to support great content is the next big change for the Web. And it will happen if we provide them with a simple, easy-to-use solution that allows them to fund the art, music, and journalism they love." Linus Olsson, from #Flattr

Surveillance is part of the web browsing experience mostly due to ads and social beacons. Trying to block them off not only degrades the user experience but may not provide the expected benefits as it may provide a different type of surveillance. Ad blocking does not appear to be the solution after all. So what can provide more privacy when surfing the web? The question remains open.

As we pass 2.5bn smartphones on earth and head towards 5bn, and mobile moves from creation to deployment, the questions change. What's the state of the smartphone, machine learning and 'GAFA', and what can we build as we stand on the shoulders of giants?

Jean-Marie Grange's insight:

It is obvious now that Mobile is eating the world, 60% of the time spent online in the US is on mobile applications!

This presentation also shows that AI is coming very strong too. I like the explanation of AI with the dog photos, it is now more a question of data than rules...

Explore interactive charts from the 2016 MIT SMR/Deloitte Digital Business Study and find out how companies are aligning their people, processes, and culture to achieve long-term digital success. Personalized the data to see how your organization measures up.

There's a wide market for eCommerce apps, just as there are for almost any other popular software category. Some are simple tools for selling individual products; others are focused on enterprises with large sales volumes and warehouses of inventory.

In this post, we want to share more details of our current password storage mechanism and our reasoning behind it. Our password storage scheme relies on three different layers of cryptographic protections, as the figure below illustrates. For ease of elucidation, in the figure and below we omit any mention of binary encoding (base64).

Very technical summary from dropbox of their password encryption algorithm.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

I expect all cloud service providers to treat my information as confidential, starting with my passwords. With the care and attention that dropbox protects its password, you can see how top tier cloud providers - Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook - will most often be more secure than anything you can do, even if you are a fairly large corporation. Trust cloud services as they are probably more secure than whatever your internal IT can provide. It is their bread and butter and their reputation - and ultimately their whole business - relies on it.

A while ago, all it took to be a great password manager was to keep your passwords in an encrypted vault. Now the best password managers give you the option to sync or keep them local only, change web passwords with a click, log in to sites for you, and more. This week, we're looking at five of the best options.

Accelerating change Added to the perfect storm of cost pressures, rising inflation and slowing wage growth could impact consumer confidence and therefore dampen demand. Retailers will also have to contend with ongoing disruption from the next wave of digital technologies and will need to prioritise investment in the technologies that will really add value for…

Avoid these mistakes to prevent digital transformation failure There's no doubt that Digital Transformation initiatives have been a major trend in 2016 whi. Marketing topic(s):Manage Digital Transformation. Advice by Expert commentator.

OK, this study is sponsored by SAP, so it is IT centric, but it is intersting to read that collaboration between all the departments (IT and non-IT) is seen as a key success factor in digital initiatives. Very true, but not always easy to implement...

A survey of 812 senior executives continues to show that companies expect IT and the CIO to drive the digital transformation but that IT department are not ready or equipped to lead the way. Been like that for a long time. Sad.

The 'theme' of who should lead and who should coordinate is becoming a common challenge. This plays out in big data and analytics , innovation, digital transformation and is really an issue of coordination and governance

It’s the dream isn’t it? Everyone working together in perfect harmony, achieving a collaborative network that positively affects productivity. Like every good dream it is possible. With some planning and vision you can soon have your team working together as one! So what exactly is the formula to achieving a culture of collaboration? Although every company has a slightly different take on this, the businesses who achieve success also share some common ground. Building a culture of collaboration

Jean-Marie Grange's insight:

A company with no culture of collaboration cannot work as a team. The top management has to lead the way and show the example by demonstrating transparency and sharing...

Blockchain is a decentralized transaction and data management technology developed first for Bitcoin cryptocurrency. The interest in Blockchain technology has been increasing since the idea was coined in 2008. The reason for the interest in Blockchain is its central attributes that provide security, anonymity and data integrity without any third party organization in control of the transactions, and therefore it creates interesting research areas, especially from the perspective of technical challenges and limitations. In this research, we have conducted a systematic mapping study with the goal of collecting all relevant research on Blockchain technology. Our objective is to understand the current research topics, challenges and future directions regarding Blockchain technology from the technical perspective. We have extracted 41 primary papers from scientific databases. The results show that focus in over 80% of the papers is on Bitcoin system and less than 20% deals with other Blockchain applications including e.g. smart contracts and licensing. The majority of research is focusing on revealing and improving limitations of Blockchain from privacy and security perspectives, but many of the proposed solutions lack concrete evaluation on their effectiveness. Many other Blockchain scalability related challenges including throughput and latency have been left unstudied. On the basis of this study, recommendations on future research directions are provided for researchers.

Jean-Marie Grange's insight:

Blockchain technology has a great potential of development, but it is also facing some challenges. This in-deapth research list all those challenges.

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.